


Bridges

by halotolerant



Category: Tintin (Comics)
Genre: Curtain Fic, Domestic, M/M, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 02:58:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5522870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An interlude during <i>The Castafiore Emerald</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Bridges

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kindkit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/gifts).



“It’s only really just occurred to me – so much has been happening!” Tintin laughs a little and shakes his head. He comes to sit in a chair pulled close to where Haddock has parked his wheelchair.

 

It has been a long evening; cocktails and then dinner and then coffee in the drawing room with Irma, Wagner and the Cataclysm herself. Haddock has spent his day in the chair, restless with the lack of exercise, and all the same he feels exhausted.

 

“What I realised,” Tintin continues, in a lower tone, “is that the Signora wrote to _me_ to ask to stay here. Well, ‘ask’ is a relative term I suppose.” He laughs again, quick and perhaps – Haddock thinks – just a little nervous.

 

Tintin is the past master of putting on a brave face. But Haddock knows him now, and as no one else does.

 

You might suppose that as someone got older, they would grow bolder in turn. With Tintin, Haddock suspects, it has been the reverse. He was fifteen and indomitable and defiant when they met, and then sixteen and a self-designated immortal, but then came seventeen, and now eighteen, and he’s been to places in his heart, now, that perhaps dwarf even interstellar geography.

 

Haddock knows, because he went along for the ride. Every single time.

 

“She wrote to me,” Tintin carries on, and twists his hands together in front of him, not meeting Haddock’s eye. And then, perhaps noticing this himself and practicing his typical lack of self-pity, he does look up, and bites his lip. “She wrote to me, not to you. She wrote as if I could decide who was allowed to come to stay at Marlinspike. As if… as if it were my home.”

 

For just longer than a natural blink, Haddock lets himself close his eyes.

 

A sharp stab of pain goes through him that has nothing to do with his ridiculous sprained ankle.

 

And if only he hadn’t hurt it! Casabianca could have come to Marlinspike to find all but she had fled, and had the run of the place, and he and Tintin could have been in Italy by now, in Venice perhaps, eating tiny pastries and sipping rich, bitter coffee, or wandering the art treasures of Florence or the grandeur of Rome.

 

And most importantly of all, avoiding this conversation.

 

“I wish,” Haddock says slowly, “that you would think of this house as your home, Tintin. Don’t you, then?”

 

He makes himself add the question, rather than just leave the ambiguity. He, with age, has gained in boldness. Tintin has given him that. Or, perhaps more accurately, he has realised that there is nothing he wouldn’t dare to do for Tintin’s sake.

 

If you followed someone, the way he followed Tintin through Tibet, almost anyone in receipt of that devotion would perceive the love that drove it, and duly hate or love or pity in return. And during that journey and for quite a while after, he’d feared exactly that; finally discovering how Tintin would act if he _knew_.

 

He’d never considered what seems to be the reality of the situation; that Tintin would not come to deduce anything at all.  

 

Now, Tintin twists awkwardly in his chair, and is looking at the floor again.

 

“I mean,” Tintin murmurs. “I do live here.” He says it like a confession. And indeed it’s not like they discussed his moving in. He stayed, visiting from Labrador Road, and then stayed longer, and then at some point his flat was sub-let. But Haddock has never actually spoken about this with him in so many words before.

 

“You live here, yes,” Haddock says, and wishes he had a drink in his hand – an old familiar struggle, the only one older than this editing exercise of talking to Tintin about what he wants. “You live here, but I wish you would think of it as _your_ home, just as much as it is mine.”

 

It’s strangely liberating, in some ways, this sense that Tintin will never see what he means by such a declaration. And this is as far as Haddock ever intends to bridge the gap between innocence and experience. If Tintin comes to know reasons besides friendship that might make two adult men live together, it will not be from Haddock.

 

(But then, oh but then! To learn that from another! From someone who – under whatever circumstances – could never possibly be as gentle as was necessary or as generous as is only right. Or ever be right at all. Haddock would keelhaul the swab. The only problem is how often he feels that swab is himself.)

 

Tintin coughs. He hasn’t looked up, but hasn’t moved away either, which is something more than it might seem. Tintin will sit for hours poring over investigation files or at his typewriter, but he’s skittish about the personal, and all too adept at finding escape routes.

 

“After all,” Haddock urges, “it was you that found the treasure in the cellars in the first place! Not to mention the models of the _Unicorn_! I wouldn’t own Marlinspike at all if not for you, and by any rights you should have had a share at the time – no, no, I won’t got into that,” he raises his hand to stem familiar protestations. “However, the fact remains that without you this house would legally belong to Cuthbert. Not that he doesn’t seem to think it does anyway,” he adds dryly, and looks over to his repaired Florentine mirror and to where, once, he’d had a pair to his surviving Chinese vase on the mantelpiece.

 

Tintin chews at the inside of his lip. His face has changed, since Haddock has known him. He has something, now, like a five o’clock shadow, and that edge of roughness on his beauty is far too delightful.

 

“Captain,” Tintin says now, and Haddock knows that look in his eyes. This is the real conversation, here and now, and what preceded it – as important as it sounded – mere assemblage of troops.

 

“Captain, those reporters from Paris-Flash. They saw you with Signora Castafiore and… Well, they were only here one afternoon, and they thought she was only staying here a month, but they…”

 

Tintin looks up, and he’s all bravery, and how could Haddock for a moment have thought otherwise?

 

“I know what people might say about us, Captain,” Tintin says, firmly. “I do know. And if other people act as if… as if I’m châtelaine” – he uses the female form, Haddock is sure, quite consciously – “here, as Castafiore did, then who knows what they might feel able to print?”

 

Haddock takes a very deep breath. He has nothing he can possibly say. He grips tightly to the arm of his wheelchair, and tries to stifle every part of himself yearning to cry out.

 

“Doesn’t that bother you, Captain?” Tintin prompts.

 

Haddock looks at him. He won’t lie. He would never lie to Tintin.

 

He wouldn’t be that kind of swab, either.

 

Tintin stares at him, for minutes and hours.

 

“Oh,” Tintin says.

 

Haddock stood with the boy as they watched planet Earth glow on the horizon of the Moon. Tintin didn’t sound like that then.

 

“Oh, Captain!” Tintin sighs, and crosses the distance between them.

 

 


End file.
